Lottery scratch-off or instant games have become a time-honored method of raising revenue for state and federal governments the world over. Indeed, the concept of hiding indicia information under a SOC has also been applied to numerous other products such as commercial contests, telephone card account numbers, gift cards, etc. Literally, billions of scratch-off products are printed every year where the Scratch-Off-Coatings (SOCs) are used to ensure that the product has not been previously used, played, or modified.
Typically, the indicia are printed using a specialized high-speed ink jet printer or imager with a water-soluble dye. Normally, the indicia are monochromatic black or in some cases red in color, but in all cases each type of indicia is imaged as a discrete spot color.
This use of single spot color indicia imaging has repeatedly proven to be problematic with traditional spot color inkjet heads partially clogging, such that a portion of the indicia prints while other portions do not. For example, in January 2015, a Roswell, New Mexico lottery player believed he won over $500,000 in an instant ticket key number match game. The lottery player believed that he was holding a winning ticket 100 (FIG. 1) because the key number match indicia was “1” and the lottery ticket misprint, due to clogged inkjet, made the intended indicia numbers of “18” and “13” to appeared to be two occurrences (101 and 102) of the winning key match number “1” (i.e., two $250,000 winners) with the intended second indicia digits barely appearing (101 and 102) on the ticket 100. A similar $500,000 misprint due to clogged inkjet heads occurred with the Florida Lottery (FIG. 2—110) with the ticket holders filing a lawsuit against the lottery after they were told their apparent winning ticket was a misprint. Again, in the case of the Florida Lottery, the misprinted ticket 110 displayed misprinted key match indicia 111, which when matched to game indicia 112 readily appeared to be a $500,000 winner. Indeed, there are many other documented cases (e.g., Wisconsin Lottery apparent $1,000 winning ticket) of instant ticket misprints due to clogged inkjet imager heads with some news media and attorneys claiming that the lottery or the ticket manufacturer should be forced to pay for the apparent misprinted prize value.
Some attempts to mitigate the problem of clogged lottery inkjet misprints have been attempted with the incorporation of detailed legal disclaimers, abbreviated captions of indicia, and the development of elaborate automated press monitoring systems—e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 7,665,400 (Duke). However, legal disclaimers do nothing to mitigate bad press resulting from misprinted lottery tickets and so far have not stopped lawsuits. Additionally, most players do not notice any indicia captions due to small size and abbreviated spelling—see FIG. 3 magnification of Florida ticket 110′ misprinted key match indicia 113 and associated caption 114. Automated press monitoring systems, while commendable in theory, have in practice proved to be both expensive and unreliable—e.g., the previously cited New Mexico Lottery misprinted ticket 100 of FIG. 1 and Florida Lottery misprinted ticket 110 of FIG. 2 were both printed with the support of an automatic press monitoring system as disclosed in the cited Duke patent.
To date, some state jurisdictions have attempted to pass legislation forcing lotteries or their ticket providers to pay out apparent prizes on misprinted tickets with comments like: “That's a real problem because people are throwing away tickets all the time that could very well be winning tickets if these misprints are out there . . . .” It is therefore highly desirable to develop techniques and methodologies for ensuring the redundancy and integrity of scratch-off ticket indicia. Ideally, these redundancy mechanisms would also provide added security against pin-prick attacks of instant tickets where a nefarious person attempts to identify winning indicia via a series of small holes on the SOC such that the attacked ticket still appears to be intact and unplayed to the untrained eye. Particularly, these redundancy and security techniques should enhance the aesthetics of the ticket or document rather than detracting from its appearance. The present invention essentially eliminates or solves problems of misprints or tampered tickets or other documents.